In the same range, I'm rather fond of the filtering feature of vim (actually, I think it's a feature of all "standard" vi's).

If you prefix the ! with a range (i.e. "%" for the whole buffer, or ".,147" for current line thru line 147, or "'a,'b" for marker a thru marker b, etc.), vi will pipe the given range into the external command that follows the bang, and replace it with the output of the same command.

Very useful for one-liners, IMHO. Example: you're editing an SQL file with zillions of INSERT statements, and want to insert a COMMIT every 500 lines, lest the rollback segments chokes under the load:

:%!perl -ple "print 'COMMIT;' unless $.\%500"

[download]

You need to escape the modulo operator, lest vi interpolates into the current buffer name

The down side is that you don't see error messages. Unless maybe you say 2>&1 (haven't tried that yet, though

--bwana147

In reply to Re: Re: Favorite Text Editor? by bwana147
in thread Favorite Text Editor? by Rhandom

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.